Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate VIII (Team Frenchie Edition)

[Rowsdower!]

Yeah, Bane is sentenced to prison from birth because the authorities in Santa Prisca can't get their hands on his scumbag father.

[jmc]

Originally Posted by Demon Hunter

I didn't know that Talia was supposed to be in the movie and I was genuinely surprised when the twist happened. I loved it. Few scenes before it I was still a bit disappointed that Nolan decided to ignore the comics and had made Bane Ra's son when I clearly knew he wasn't supposed to be.
You know... spoiling the movie for yourself and then claiming something isn't important or wasn't a twist at all... I don't get that.

Because it's not about being spoiled, intentionally or unintentionally, it's about having an investement in the character.

[kvz5]

http://clothesonfilm.com/the-dark-kn...hemming/27416/

CoF: Who was the trickiest character to nail down?

LH: The trickiest character to nail down was Marion as Miranda Tate, who must not be given away during the course of the film, but who needed to look ethnic in some way that might relate her to Ra’s A Ghul by the end quarter of the story. Very Difficult.

[JawZ270589]

By the way,
do you guys know, in what magazine this photo was taken from?


Are there any of you who have the high quality picture of this?

[Klidokrator]

If only Miranda was introduced in the first or the second film... That was to be a revelation

[deadshot daquir]

she did ok

but i didnt like how bruce slept w/ "miranda tate" after not even knowing her .....

and he trusted selina .... and they both betrayed him

thats a serious character flaw in nolan's interpretation of batman i think

they shouldn't have implied that she died, but maybe show a shot where her hand twitched or something to suggest that she died

[shauner111]

Bruce sleeping with a woman after not knowing her much....what a tragedy!

[BatLobsterRises]

Yeah seriously. Honestly, I was happy for the guy. He probably hadn't been laid in 8 years and was extremely vulnerable at the moment. Give him a break!

[Demon Hunter]

shauner111 is your signature, your fancast for a Justice League movie?

[Baneis8feettall]

I would still sleep with Marion even i knew she is gonna stab me later.

[kvz5]

Public Enemies is on TV and I was reminded again on why I wanted to see Bale and Marion as lovers in a movie.

*stomps foot*

[AnneFan]

Originally Posted by kvz5

Public Enemies is on TV and I was reminded again on why I wanted to see Bale and Marion as lovers in a movie.

*stomps foot*

"I have your back, Miranda."

Tatelia smiles, thinks to herself *Bane has yours, Bruce*

[kvz5]

He carries her while she's soaked in urine and she repays him by stabbing him.

The world is conspiring against my fangirl heart.

[kvz5]

From Hitfix' "2nd look" analysis of TDKR:

http://www.hitfix.com/motion-capture...d-and-the-ugly

MIRANDA TATE

The slow knife. She is the true villain of the film, although she spends less than fifteen total minutes of screen time revealed as Talia Al Ghul. Everything that happens in the film happens because of a plan she devised, a plan she executed, a hatred she has harbored since the end of "Batman Begins." As with "Batman Returns," where every one of the villains could be seen as an extension, she is another dark fractured mirror version of Bruce, twisted by the death of a parent, driven to wear a different face in her pursuit of revenge. The main difference between them is that her secret identity really is a secret up to the moment she reveals herself, whereas the truth about Batman seems to be known by almost everyone in the film.

When Miranda sleeps with Bruce, it's a calculated move. She knows he's vulnerable, and she uses that as a way of getting close to him, of finally getting in so he will trust her and take her to the fusion reactor. She's been biding her time but finally has to press because the mechanics are in motion. She's the one who wants Wayne's personal data, his fingerprints. She's the one whispering in Bane's ear, all the while portraying herself as a sympathetic presence. She throws a charity ball that she pays for out of her own pocket, shaming Bruce when he tries to poke at her in conversation. She is too good to be true, and that gets through to Bruce so that when Alfred leaves and he's broken emotionally, he needs someone and she's close. She's suddenly available and right there, and Bruce is human. It's one of his genuine mistakes in the film, trusting her, leaving her alone in Wayne Manor, for god's sake. He gets up from sleeping with her, puts on the suit, and heads out as Batman. How crazy is that, in the first place, and how easy would it have been for Miranda to just kill him in his sleep when they were together? All the mechanics, everything she puts the city through, playing innocent the whole time so that every move he makes, he's feeding directly to her, it's all because of her and her hatred for him for taking her father.

And why shouldn't she hate him? Let's imagine that you pare away Bruce Wayne's story altogether and you just tell the story of a young man who falls in love with the wrong woman and is punished horribly for it. His child is taken away, and forced to grow up in darkness and in pain, and eventually escapes, reuniting with her father. Together, they build something, an organization designed to strike back at the people who exercise their power over others with prisons and torture, designed to make sure that she and her father need never fear anyone again. Is her story really that far off from Bruce's? There's more drama in the relationship between father and daughter, drama brought on by a young man, and things are tense and weird as a result. Even so, when the father is killed, the daughter is destroyed, and she devotes everything she's got, along with her one love, to finding and destroying the person who did it to her. If the trilogy told her story, then the entire third film is all about her triumphant plan going perfectly well until the last three or four minutes, when it all goes to hell and she loses. The end. That's a raw deal for her, and this really has been building all that time for the character, even if I think Nolan did some clever reverse-engineering to tie it all together. His use of the clip of Neeson talking about his back-story from "Batman Begins" is spectacular, a great example of a distant mountain that he and his brother and Goyer dropped into that first film's script, and they've taken it and turned that hint into something big and operatic and, in the end, fairly sad.

I think it's always rough to see revenge played out on such a big primal scale. Miranda's wrath is horrible, relentless. She takes Bruce's money. She takes his legacy. She takes his dignity. She takes his freedom. And then she burns his city to the ground, which is really just a bigger version of R'as burning Wayne Manor to the ground in the first film. She makes him watch his beloved Gotham slowly crumble. She engineers and encourages from the shadows. It's only upon reflection that you realize how many things Miranda was doing in the time she's not onscreen. Writing a villain like this, someone whose main actions remain off-stage until the moment of reveal, is never easy, and I like the way Miranda reveals herself, the story she offers, the glimpses we see. Cotilard is awesome, and while this may be part three of a big giant corporate comic book movie, that's not the work she does. She plays this like it's real and important and just as serious as anything else she's done, and I think she's one of the things that really pulls the film together. Her few moments with her mask off, she's wrecked, and there's a dead haunted thing she's got going on that I like a lot.

Here's Bane's because they're somewhat related:

BANE

One important rule that Christopher Nolan has taken full advantage of is that Batman needs a worthy adversary in each film, someone who reflects back some aspect of himself. In the first film, Batman barely understood who he was up against. It's not until Ra's Al Ghul reveals himself at what is very close to the end of the film that Batman understands what's happening or who is pulling the strings. As a detective, he fails in almost every way, staying behind the plan the entire time. In "The Dark Knight," he had a handle on the city, even if just temporarily, and when the Joker makes himself a threat, Batman throws himself into the hunt without any hesitation. He knows how to handle The Joker, and in the end, he catches him even if he has to compromise himself in the process.

Bane is basically a combination of both the theatrical gamesmanship of R'as Al Ghul and the destructive unpredictability of The Joker, and he's also a physical threat on a scale that Batman is simply unprepared for, a mixture that seems perfect for the concluding film in the trilogy.

Like The Joker, Bane has no identity other than "Bane." He's got that one name, that one identity. He is Bane from the moment we meet him. The Joker tells constant lies about himself and his backstory, and Nolan tells one big lie about the origin of Bane. That lie is designed to hide the film's biggest reveal, and we do eventually learn the truth about Bane. It seems fitting that in the one flashback where Nolan tells the full truth about Bane's identity, we finally catch that single glimpse of Tom Hardy's face.

Bane's big plan (which could more accurately be described as Talia's big plan) is designed to do one thing: destroy Gotham. And while it is indeed elaborate to the point of insanity, elaborate in a way you never see outside of movies, depending on all sorts of predicted behavior by Batman and also requiring a sort of supernatural degree of luck to make sure everything goes his way, there is a larger purpose here.

Talia and Bane don't just want to destroy Gotham… they also want to humble Bruce Wayne. This is a movie about revenge on a grand scale with an entire city as the battleground that is chosen. Bruce, who created Batman to protect Gotham, turns out to be the match that lights the fuse on the explosive that nearly levels the city. The grand gesture is the point of the plan, of course. As we've heard repeatedly in these films, The League Of Shadows believes in theatricality. Since they know how Bruce Wayne was trained, why he was born, they know exactly how to blow past his defenses.

The entire reconnection of Bane by Nolan and company is bold and striking, starting with that voice. I'll admit freely that it makes me laugh. I love doing my Bane voice for my kids, because it makes them laugh. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's such a deranged choice, and it makes him stand out as a character. By now, you may have seen this "gotcha" video about the way the voice was reworked between the release of the prologue and the release of the film.

I'm not really sure that video proves anything other than "films are often edited with additional sound mixing during the the six months before they're released," but it is interesting to see how Nolan's thinking on the voice evolved as they got closer to release.

Because so much of his face is covered, Hardy has to communicate much of what he's thinking physically, and it's a Lon Chaney performance. It's aggressive and often quite funny. There is such attitude in his body language. People have made jokes about the banners and the stills of Bane, and I've seen a thousand variations on "Come at me, bro!" and, honestly, that's not far off from the truth. The physical performance is what makes the voice funny, and vice-versa. He's like a gorilla wearing a monocle and a tuxedo. It's communicated so clearly, and there should be credit for finding a way to make him more than just a big guy in a mask.

I've seen complaints that Bane's first fight with Batman is too brief, but that's the point. Bruce is finished the moment that fight begins. He's treating Bane as "just another bad guy," while Bane is treating Batman as the single most important fight in the world, a pure expression of his love for Talia.

That connection, that backstory for Bane and Talia, is what I wasn't expecting, and it's one of the things I really like about the film. Bane's single-mindedness is boring to me if it's just because "he's the bad guy." But as the payoff to a chaste love story, with this blinding lifelong devotion defining all of Bane's actions, I love it. And again, like R'as Al Ghul and The Joker, he uses his henchmen as disposable game pieces, easily sacrificed and never missed. He has no loyalty to anything or anyone but Talia. If you try to make sense of the politics of the film, you'll drive yourself crazy. Sure, Bane instigates a class riot, but look closer. He exploits an uneasy lower class to destroy the ruling class and in the end, he doesn't seem remotely interested in the fate of either of them except inasmuch as it affects Bruce. That's all he really cares about, and he knows how much Gotham means to Bruce. If they just kill him, and the movie makes it clear that they easily could kill him at one point, then he's gone. It's done. It's clean. The film makes the point several times that this is all about breaking down everything that matters to Bruce and making him watch. Gotham symbolizes everything that was taken from him as a kid, and Bane knows that the more he hurts Gotham, the worse it hurts Bruce.

Bane's overall attitude also makes sense if we view him as a dark funhouse mirror version of Bruce. Bane baits the hook with something that is designed to appeal to Bruce's arrogance, his overconfidence. Bane makes himself an irresistible target, and as confident as Bruce is, Bane's at least twice as sure of himself. Any moment where Bruce gets the upper hand or surprises him at all, Bane seems shocked. He's that sure of himself. Bane is what Bruce would have been if he'd followed R'as Al Ghul's order during his initiation. He also turned his back on Al Ghul, though, for a different reason. When I see people talk about the relationship that Talia and Bruce as supposed to have, it's one of those disconnects where you just have to set aside the comics or the animated series. That's not the story that's being told. This Talia could never fall in love with Bruce Wayne. She despises him for killing her father. She may have been estranged from R'as Al Ghul, and the film certainly makes it sound like her love for Bane complicated things with her father, but she still loved him. Bane should hate R'as Al Ghul for excommunicating him, but his love for Miranda is more important to him. He's willing to extract vengeance in Al Ghul's name because it is important to her. Who knows? Maybe in a different version of this world, Bruce accepted his place with R'as and he and Talia do end up together. That's just not the story Nolan wanted to tell, and so the romantic longing that drives this horrifying, destructive plan has been rebuilt completely, reassigned.

[shauner111]

Originally Posted by Demon Hunter

shauner111 is your signature, your fancast for a Justice League movie?

I wouldn't say for a "Justice League" movie, just DC characters in general. For JL i would only do 5 or 6 of those characters anyway.

[herolee10]

Originally Posted by kvz5

From Hitfix' "2nd look" analysis of TDKR:

http://www.hitfix.com/motion-capture...d-and-the-ugly



Here's Bane's because they're somewhat related:

Thanks! While great to read, it seems like the author was a bit off with one part. Talia doesn't sleep with Bruce so that he'll trust her enough to take her to the fusion reactor. By the time Talia sleeps with Bruce, she's already gotten everything, hence going back to the big question of why Talia even felt the need of sleeping with Bruce to begin with.lol

[jmc]

I'm sorry, but that article reads as someone trying to justify a poorly executed character. Subsequent viewing with the knowledge that she will turn doesn't change a damn thing about the movie or the character, in fact it makes the weakness of the character even more noticeable. You can argue all you want about wanting to punish Bruce Wayne and take revenge, but when there is no deep connection between the two the payoff come up well short. In fact I'll go so far to say the 'revelation' wasn't even earned such was the weakness of the character.

[Zatanna]

Originally Posted by herolee10

By the time Talia sleeps with Bruce, she's already gotten everything, hence going back to the big question of why Talia even felt the need of sleeping with Bruce to begin with.lol

At this point, it doesn't even matter. It didn't even come close to being the biggest problem with how the character was utilized.

I've come to the conclusion that 'Miranda' should have been introduced at some point in Batman Begins, in order to properly develop the trust (and closeness) that Bruce was supposed to feel for her, in so that the reveal really would have packed the kind of punch Nolan was looking for.

Yeah, that's how I feel, although I'd prefer it if Talia hadn't been an outright villain at all, because knowing her comic counterpart in depth the way I do, that's not the way I look at her, despite her recent depiction. But I mean, THAT ^^ would have been all kinds of wow.

[regwec]

Originally Posted by jmc

I'm sorry, but that article reads as someone trying to justify a poorly executed character. Subsequent viewing with the knowledge that she will turn doesn't change a damn thing about the movie or the character, in fact it makes the weakness of the character even more noticeable. You can argue all you want about wanting to punish Bruce Wayne and take revenge, but when there is no deep connection between the two the payoff come up well short. In fact I'll go so far to say the 'revelation' wasn't even earned such was the weakness of the character.

Yes. She was only included to introduce the obligatory "twist" into an otherwise simplistic story. I think that is why the character feels so cheap and superficial.

[Baneis8feettall]

This discussion will never end....

[The Joker]

Originally Posted by jmc

I'm sorry, but that article reads as someone trying to justify a poorly executed character. Subsequent viewing with the knowledge that she will turn doesn't change a damn thing about the movie or the character, in fact it makes the weakness of the character even more noticeable. You can argue all you want about wanting to punish Bruce Wayne and take revenge, but when there is no deep connection between the two the payoff come up well short. In fact I'll go so far to say the 'revelation' wasn't even earned such was the weakness of the character.

Originally Posted by regwec

Yes. She was only included to introduce the obligatory "twist" into an otherwise simplistic story. I think that is why the character feels so cheap and superficial.

Exactly.

[kvz5]

I find it sad that the entire backbone of that analysis to make TDKR Talia seem awesome is that she's the "big bad". The head villain responsible for it all and Bane was delegated to just someone doing all her bidding because he loves her. I don't interpret it that way but honestly I can't blame those that do.

[The Batman]

Originally Posted by Baneis8feettall

This discussion will never end....

Of course, if everyone was praising it, you'd never want it to.

[regwec]

Hah! That was a gem, Batman.

[Bruce_Begins]

Yeah, 'cause Endless criticisms are always welcome, and praise should be short for a movie like TDKR.